Subject: Re: Question: Lisp's power points
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 21:26:30 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3211824385979077@naggum.net>
* Károly Ladvánszky
| I'm new to Lisp. Would anyone be kind to show me a few short examples
| that demonstrate the power of Lisp?
You seem to be a Microsoft user. I am not. Could you show me a few
short examples that demonstrate the power of the Windows environment?
| I'm especially interested about the symbol manipulation features. Are
| there 'magic' constructs native to Lisp, constructs that would need a lot
| more coding in languages like C++?
There are two kinds of constructs in a Common Lisp vs C++ comparison:
1 Those for which C++ uses one- or two-character prefix, infix, and postfix
notation, where C++ excels in compactness and expressibility, which leads
many people to think that C++ is somehow compact and easy to write and
express yourself in, even while the bulk of your code is not using these
small and elegant syntactic sugarcubes.
2 Those for which Common Lisp use the same syntax as everything else, where
Common Lisp excels in overall compactness and expressibility because of a
_much_ higher level of abstraction and much lower number of minor details
that needs expressing, meaning that the value of a super-compact syntax
for the simplest operators is correspondingly lower.
It should be fairly obvious that comparisons have to be performed at two
different levels at once and thus will produce no useful results if you
do not already understand what you just compared on their own merits.
///
--
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